Modelling India’s coal production with a negatively skewed curve-fitting model

India’s coal demand is forecast to increase at a rapid pace in the future due to the country’s economic and population growth. Analyzing the scope for future production of India’s domestic coal resources, therefore, plays a vital role in the country’s development of sound energy policies. This paper presents a quantitative scenario analysis of India’s potential future coal production by using a negatively skewed curve-fitting model and a range of estimates of the country’s ultimately recoverable resources (URR) of coal. The results show that the resource base is sufficient for India’s coal production to keep increasing over the next few decades, to reach between 2400 and 3200 Mt/y at 2050, depending on the assumed value of URR. A further analysis shows that the high end of this range, which corresponds to our ‘GSI’ scenario, can be considered as the probable upper-bound to India’s domestic coal production. Comparison of production based on the ‘GSI’ scenario with India’s predicted demand shows that the domestic production of coal will be insufficient to meet the country’s rising coal demand, with the gap between demand and production increasing from its current value of about 268 Mt/y to reach 300 Mt/y in 2035, and 700 Mt/y by 2050. This increasing gap will be challenging for the energy security of India

Droplet homogeneous nucleation in a turbulent vapour jet in the two-way coupling regime

Homogeneous nucleation of liquid droplets in hot vapour stream, mixing with a cooler and dry external environment, occurs in many technological applications, ranging from the generation of filter test particles to the control of fugitive emissions from industrial sources (refineries), up to the young discipline of Particle Engineering in the biotech industries. However, a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of a vapour jet is still missing, despite the multitude of experiments and its relevance for applications, which could benefit from a better understanding of such multi-physics turbulent flows. Classical Nucleation Theory (CNT) prescribes rates and critical diameters at which droplets nucleate, depending on the local thermodynamical state. Because of the strongly nonlinear interplay between homogeneous nucleation and turbulent fluctuations, it is crucial not only to take into account all the relevant scales of turbulence, but even all the cross-coupling phenomena involved. DNS allows to capture, without any modelling, the turbulence underlying the carrier phase dynamics. In the two-way coupling regime, the disperse phase back- reaction is then accounted within the point-particle approach. The relevance of these effects on the whole process of the phase-change, i.e. droplets nucleation, condensation and evaporation, will be discussed. In particular, it will be pointed out how much the droplets back-reaction, on the thermodynamics (especially due to the phase-change), does affect the subsequent droplets nucleation rate